MUMBAI: Half way into the financial year, information technology industry body The National Association of Software and Services Companies (Nasscom) has scaled down its growth expectations from country's software services sector blaming slower growth at India's back offices of multi-national corporations.

Nasscom now expects the industry to grow by at least 11%, against the earlier forecast of 11-14%.

Based on the revised guidance, Nasscom has projected export revenues of $75-77 billion ( 4.1-4.2 trillion) in the year to March 31. Including the domestic business, the industry is worth about $100 billion.

"The GICs (global in-house centres or captive units) are going through huge efficiency improvement. They are on a cost-plus model," said Nasscom president Som Mittal.

Currency movements had also adversely impacted revenues reported by captives, which make up about 20-25% of software exports.

The mid-year review was necessitated by a tough and uncertain economic environment in the sectors' two largest markets - the US and Europe -which together consume about 80% services exported by the sector. Vast divergence in growth among India's top five software services - with some growing fast while others lagged behind significantly unlike the uniform growth a few years ago - has also taken the wind out of industry sails these past two years.

Infosys, second largest software services exporter, stopped giving out quarterly growth guidance earlier this year, as its management said it was unable to accurately predict near-term spending patterns of its clients. Infosys expects to grow at least 5% during the current fiscal. Another top-tier company Wipro has also been struggling to return to growth path and has been barely managing at 1-2% sequential growth in the past quarters.

In contrast, both HCL Technologies and largest software services exporter TCS are growing at a steady clip and gaining market share.

"Growth rate has picked up in September and many companies have indicated that the second half will be better than that of the first half. Based on that, we are pretty confident we will meet the lower end of the guidance," said Nasscom chairman and TCS CEO N Chandrasekaran.

Measured in local currency, however, the sector will grow at by about 18-20%. A year marked by wild swings of the rupee has seen a high of about 52 against the dollar and a low of 56.

In the long term, the industry has good growth prospects, Nasscom said as corporations worldwide seek technology services to improve their processes, and become more efficient. What is helping Indian IT is also a large number of technology outsourcing deals signed nearly a decade ago coming up for renewal now. Such deals, where corporations are looking to reduce the number of smaller deals and service providers, have increased 25% in 2012, according to Nasscom.

The industry body has set up a committee, headed by Infosys co-founder and chairman emeritus, NR Narayana Murthy, to draw a roadmap for the next 10 years.

"Nasscom is the centre of the development of this (IT) industry. We have kicked off an exercise on what infrastructure we must have in Nasscom in order to address the opportunities in core IT, digital solutions, infrastructure, engineering services, business process management," said Chandrasekaran.

As compared to a decade ago, when the offshore business model was still establishing itself, the software industry is now several times larger and in many sub-segments such as engineering services, which are sizable opportunities on their own.

"There is a huge opportunity ahead and it's time for us to make the necessary investments, initiatives to capture all the opportunities," Chandrasekaran added.

The apex industry body is will also appoint a committee to find a replacement for Nasscom president, Som Mittal, whose term in coming to an end this year but who will stay on for another year. Mittal's term was the most tumultuous in any president's tenure characterised not only by the global financial meltdown, which hit demand for software services, but also high unemployment in Indian IT's key markets of US and UK and increased protectionism by governments in these countries.